The richest Americans—just one percent of the population—control 40 percent of the nation's wealth. And while they enjoy the best health care, education, and other benefits of privilege, argues Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, they fail to recognize that their prosperity is tied to how the rest of us live. To those who insist that capitalism works best when the wealthy are free to make themselves wealthier, Stiglitz answers that moneyed interests compound their wealth by constraining the market, crippling growth and making us the most inequitable of all the advanced industrial nations. Stiglitz teases out the real costs of our lopsided society—for monetary and budgetary policy, for democracy, and for globalization—and then gives us a plan for a more just and prosperous future.